Wednesday Word: 3/30/10

I will first off apologize for my unforeseen absence last week, school sometimes gets in the way of the super-bloggage and all. Anyways, there are a few different things to talk about in the world of sports, and as always I will try and keep things are SIUexciting as possible with limited outside commercial interruption.
In retribution for my horrid acts (and since I am in class right now...We are posting a little early!)
NCAA follow-up
I will start with some college basketball, previously on the Alestle Live Sportsblog, I pimped a number of mid-majors poised to make some noise in the NCAA tournament.
I did not fill out a bracket (which confused a number of people I talked to about the tournament) and it made the whole damn thing that much more exciting! (kudos to the midmajority.)
My big surprise, Siena was a dud, but other mids thrived. Butler is still playing basketball in the Final Four (with Murray State, my other potential sleeper NEARLY knocking them off in the second round, after a big last-second win over Vanderbilt(all praise Danero Thomas))
Cornell, Northern Iowa and Saint Mary's made the Sweet 16, Old Dominion knocked off Notre Dame and I came away from the first few rounds of the tournament with my head held high.
Everyone at SIUe needs to get behind Butler, and support a fellow mid-major in the Final Four.
This sadly concludes my season talking about college basketball on this blog until we get some off-season SIUE news. I cannot wait until November. Hopefully we can crack the top-300 in the RPI.
NEXT!
The BOOT GOT BACK!
The regular season does not kick-off until September for SIUE soccer, but Kevin Kalish and company are not taking the off-season lightly. Last week, SIUE battled one of the newest professional soccer teams around, AC St. Louis to a 0-0 draw at Korte Stadium, and the fun will continue Saturday, as the Cougars take on Saint Louis University at Soccer Park in Fenton, prior to ACSTL's game against the MLS Kansas City Wizards to revive one of the greatest rivalries in college soccer history.
And no, that is not a joke.
SIUE against SLU is one of the biggest rivalries in the history of college soccer, and since 1995, it has been collecting cobwebs.
The two teams battled throughout the 70's and 80's for the illustrious "Bronze boot," (for some reason, google doesn't bring up much about the rivalry, STLsoccernet has lots of stories though if you read through the forums.)
As a matter of fact, the 1980 game featuring the defending national champion Cougars brought 20,000 plus to old Busch Stadium and to this day remains the highest attended collegiate soccer game in US history.

SIUE against SLU is a BIG DEAL, even at this juncture in the season. The pre-season.

The SIUE soccer team is officially a full-fledged Division I program, carrying the fast-track label for SIUE men's sports through the transition process - competing in the Missouri Valley Conference. The team did fairly well during its final season of the transitioning phase, and now since SIUE is back in the top tier of the sport, the rivalry will be re-born. I am waiting on a call-back from Coach Kalish to write a feature on the traditional rivalry, so I don't know about the status of a fall resurgence,  but SIUE's sports information highly hinted towards SLU being on the regular season schedule, going as far as calling this game "A prelude to the boot."

No word on whether or not an actual boot will be involved in the festivities Saturday, or once the two teams tangle again in the regular season.

A question that comes to my mind when calling this match-up a true rivalry deals with the level of competition between these two schools and the fire involved in calling it a rivalry. Believe me, it won't take long for SIUE to get back on par with SLU in soccer, and competing towards the NCAA tournament. SIUE is historically such a good program with national championship tradition in a St. Louis market obsessed with soccer. Local players really have two options: SLU or SIUE.
Coach Kalish was recently interviewed for the previously vacant SLU coaching job, and he is an alumnus of SLU and member of SLU's all-mid-century team.
You have a coaching sub-plot, regional ties, an already existing recruiting rivalry and long-term history to back it up. Right now, the SLU people have the "what's in it for me" attitude, since SIUE has yet to re-establish itself to its previous heights. That will come.
Personally, I think it is going to be hard to get the student body behind the soccer team to its fullest extent, because well, it doesn't get the media attention and it just isn't basketball. This isn't the 70's, but things are looking up for the team, so if you have a chance to get out to Soccer Park Saturday you should. The game starts at 5:30, and afterwards an MLS team plays! We don't have one of those yet, so it should be loads of fun. Heck with beer it's the most fun you will ever have! Tickets are $10.
Balls, Bats and Cougars
SIUE's other fast-tracked team, softball is struggling. This year's team has played enough this year to earn the tag of being an inconsistent bunch, as the record shows at 16-16. No 40 win season this year. I find it hard to get my head around this team. One night, they beat a Big Ten team, the next they get shut out by Northern Illinois. It seems like the runs come in bunches, and the droughts do as well. Never a good combination. Lots of time to figure it out still, in another "independent" season.
The baseball team is finally starting to come around a little bit from the mound, the offense is always there. You can count on SIUE to score 10 runs a night but unfortunately, half the time it's safe to bet they allow 20. SIUE earned two consecutive wins over the weekend against Tennessee Tech, 11-8 in extra innings and 12-4. SIUE is finally back home April 10 against UT Martin, a place where they have a combined staff ERA of 0.50...in two games. Life on the road is tough.
Today's Holy $#!* realization
On a non-sports note, this is a special, exciting, unforeseen and miraculous thing happening on campus April 1, and it should bring a tear of joy to all of our collective eyes.

AFTER 45 YEARS OF BEING THERE FOR NO PARTICULAR REASON AND BEING WELDED SHUT THROUGH THE CONTINUOUS SCIENTIFIC EFFECT OF WEATHERING, THE BACK DOOR TO LOVEJOY LIBRARY IS OPENING! No. Way. 

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My school:SIUe

(Originally appeared on midmajority.com)

Driving Eastward on interstate 255 from St. Louis there's large billboard with the simple phrase "Cougars rising," and each time I see it I inevitably crack a smile, because the Cougars are my work, education and my life. I'm rising too.
A short 20 minute drive from that billboard lies our den; a quaint 3,000 seat venue as freshly remodeled as it is fresh to the mid-majority. Here at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the Vadalabene Center, the rising is happening before our eyes. This is the St. Louis area's newest Division I program.
Before every game, I take a seat along the empty row of media along the baseline about an hour before tip off and set up a live game blog which will inevitably go unread. I gather notes and a bottled water from a kinesiology classroom on the far end of the gym, a room set up as a pseudo media room. It even has a skeleton model hiding behind the black and red backdrop that's set up for post-game interviews.
I grew up with this basketball program living in Edwardsville for 21 years. As a young kid, I'd spend Saturday afternoons shooting hoops in my driveway, eagerly awaiting my grandparents to pick me up and take me to a special land of hoops. At an early age I learned the ropes of this D-II sub-mid-majority, and followed SIUE basketball as if it was a D-I program... not knowing what the future would hold.
I vividly remember a few things from this era. I remember the blue reserved seats beneath a cast of puke brown bleachers. And I was that kid, the overly enthusiastic ADD one who knew every player on the team and their tendencies. I knew the records of every team in the Great Lakes Valley Conference. Yeah, that kid. I knew just as much, if not more, about SIUE hoops than the loyal grey haired folks who come to the Vadalabene Center for every game, no matter what the record is, no matter who shows up to provide competition. Back then, I gave players from the likes of (then D-II) IPFW hell. I even provided play-by-play from the stands, practicing for a long and illustrious career in the broadcast booth. Move over, Billy Packer!

The game-night experience was not over until well after leaving. I would always have my grandparents tune into the post-game show on the local radio broadcast. I wanted to hear what then-head coach Jack Margenthaler had to say. That was usually followed by ice cream, which I'd eat while my grandparents and I shared thoughts on the game.
Margenthaler retired from SIUE in 2002 after posting a 112-150 record. Before his days in Edwardsville, he had a winning record with Western Illinois University, where he coached the Leathernecks to two D-II NCAA Tournaments.
The women's basketball team was much more successful during this period, going to the NCAA tournament in 1998, 1999 and 2001. More often than not, a day at the Vadalabene Center meant a double-header, giving me a second team to cheer for.
After Margenthaler's retirement, I was 13. The Cougars started improving as SIUE entered the Marty Simmons era. And my grandparents still had plenty of free season tickets, which were given to them by the local car dealership that my grandfather works for. Coach Simmons would eventually go back to his alma mater, Evansville, but Simmons and his signature sweater vest became the turning point for SIUE basketball.
By the time I was almost ready for college, SIUE finally broke through. After one bad year and a second mediocre one, the Cougars finally earned a trip to the NCAA tournament. I was not nearly as excited as I had been about the team, because I did not anticipate it truly becoming "my own" two short years later. I was a young man sick of his surroundings by then. The pink houses, the countless fast-food jobs I worked had caught up with me, and I felt I needed a new challenge. SIUE's postseason run, eventually culminating with a disappointing 60-58 loss to Virginia Union, was something I was following with great interest, but that year I took more of a "hometown-appreciation" approach to rooting them on. I didn't have that childhood connection anymore.
I wanted to go to college somewhere else in the mid-majority. I knew I could never get into a place like the University of Illinois or the University of Missouri; I had an utter disdain for their athletic programs. Southern Illinois Carbondale was busy wrecking the Big Dance across the state, and I wanted to go there, or somewhere like that.
Simmons went away to clear the path for former Bradley assistant Lennox Forrester, but the only college I ended up applying to was the local one with the Cougar mascot. While I was researching schools I would never go to -- like SIUE's sister school Southern Illinois Carbondale, which is highly despised in this corner of the state -- SIUE was exploring the possibility of reclassifying it's athletic programs to D-I. In March of 2007, the school formally announced it would do so.
In June of 2008, the Cougars joined the Ohio Valley Conference as the only non-American-Style Football school among its ranks, replacing Samford after their departure for the Southern Conference. This made me feel a little better about a future at SIUE. The value of my future diploma went up as high as LeShaun Murphy on a dunk!
My freshman year in college marked our last year in D-II obscurity. In 2008-2009, the Cougars officially took off. They're still rising, attempting the transitional NCAA hurdles, hoping against hope to have the necessary pieces in place by 2012-2013, when the hallowed land of March Madness will finally be within reach.
Over this past summer, I was promoted to sports editor at SIUE's student newspaper, the Alestle, where I have worked since my first day of college. I made an executive decision to place extra emphasis on basketball (as opposed to some of our other collegiate sports) because this is Our Game. I make sure that I'm accompanied by a reporter and a photographer at each home game. I occasionally travel when economically possible, just to make sure I'm there for every step of this great basketball journey.
The majority of our student body remains apathetic when it comes to SIUE basketball. But the student section is emerging, the orange-clad Red Line supporters on campus are dwindling, and Cougar red is making its way out onto the quad and into the limelight. So I feel an editorial responsibility to help make and keep Cougar basketball relevant.
I love walking out onto the Vadalabene Center floor before a game now. I'm able to talk basketball with our sports information staff, our radio personalities and everyone involved in Cougar basketball. I can look up at those 10 banners acknowledging the teams in the Ohio Valley Conference -- as well as its torch logo on the court -- and the pride really hits me. To know first hand where SIUE has come from, its 14-year climb, makes every aspect of this transition more rewarding.
The Cougars are 3-21 on the season, and have been pushed around a lot while trying to manage this independent, pre-OVC schedule. There are lots of 25 percent shooting nights, days when we're doubled up on the boards, and Osiris Eldrige or Kenneth Farried have done plenty of standing in our way. It's been frustrating, but the guarantee game money has been pouring in -- supplemented by a cameo or two on ESPNU. We are not there yet, but the foundation is in place at SIUE. We want to become a special place in the mid-majority.
When SIUE wraps up this season Feb. 25 against Hannibal LaGrange, an NAIA school, SIU Edwardsville will be halfway there. Two of the school's four transitional years will have been completed. Though the D-I hardwood has been unforgiving at times, the Cougars continue living on that prayer, and we'll continue rising for two more seasons.

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